Beginning in October, if your law firm website doesn’t use SSL, Google will warn visitors who use your contact form that it is “Not Secure”. Potential clients will likely go to another lawyer’s website when they see the warning.

This is what a website without SSL looks like in the address bar of Chrome

This is what a website without SSL looks like in the address bar of Firefox

Law firm websites almost always have a contact form so potential clients can contact the law firm. If your website has a contact form, you need to switch your website to SSL immediately or Google will issue a warning to potential clients visiting your law firm website.

Potential clients are searching for lawyers on the Internet using longtail keywords. FindLaw found that longtail keyword searches where someone was looking for a lawyer accounted for 32% of all searches. 67% were less valuable research queries using regular keywords, such as “DUI laws in Texas”.

What’s the difference between a regular keyword, keyword phrase or Longtail keyword? A keyword could be “lawyer” while a keyword phrase could be “personal injury lawyer” or “Dallas personal injury lawyer”. FindLaw refers to this as a Head-Term query.

A longtail keyword is much longer and likely includes information pertaining to the searcher’s circumstances, such as “lawyer for drunk motorcyclist hit by a car in Dallas”.

Bing is now using Facebook data to display websites your friends have “liked”. This is influencing the ranking of the search engine listing results in a way that is personal to you and will display results on the first page which could previously have been several pages deeper.

If you don’t want to see results liked by your friends, you can avoid using this feature by simply not signing into Facebook. But I suspect the people you want to reach will be using it.

Lawyers have a lot of common sense. It’s probably the single most important trait of a lawyer, but when it comes to issues outside the scope of a client matter, some lawyers get lazy and put away their common sense.

I was at a seminar on May 20, 2008 about attorney advertising on the Web, where FindLaw was the featured speaker/presenter. FindLaw was presenting some useful information about websites and website advertising, but they also were promoting FindLaw websites for attorneys.

Update: I’m sure Google no longer penalizes .info because it’s simply not necessary. Google can easily distinguish a spammy website. However, because .info domain names were sold so cheap ($0.99) spammers used .info extensively and .info is viewed as suspect too many website visitors. Even today, it’s so easy to find a .com by adding a word or letters before or after the name. I only use .com.

On March 3, 2008, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s anti-spam team made several predictions for 2008, one of which was, “A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.”